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The POWER8 Libre System Failed, Now There's An AMD Libre System Effort

posted by on Wednesday January 18 2017, @04:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the not-free-as-in-beer dept.

"exec" writes:

It doesn't look like the Talos Secure Workstation will see the light of day with it's crowdfunding campaign ending this week and it's coming up more than three million dollars short of its financing goal. [Editor note: It did not meet the funding goal.] Now there's another effort to offer a libre system but using off-the-shelf x86 hardware.

[...] Libreboot developer Leah Rowe is now launching a libre system out of the ashes of the Talos Secure Workstation. She wrote in an email to Phoronix, "It's a high-end desktop/server platform, available in either configuration. It also supports virtualization and PCI passthrough, unlike older systems, so Qubes would be compatible...TALOS looks set to fail. Crowd Supply has removed it from their homepage, and Raptor Engineering is writing up an announcement that TALOS is shutting down - they are going to link to Minifree and tell people to purchase Libreboot D16 from me."

But before getting too excited, this isn't a new platform but rather an existing AMD server motherboard that simply comes pre-loaded with Libreboot to free the firmware/BIOS and then loaded with Debian GNU/Linux. The desktop and server versions make use of an AMD Opteron 6272, a.k.a. the older 32nm "Interlagos" CPUs derived from Bulldozer and released back in 2011.

-- submitted from IRC

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  • (Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday January 19 2017, @01:13AM

    by Arik (4543) on Thursday January 19 2017, @01:13AM (#455823) Journal
    I think it would be great to be able to buy a truly free and open computer, even if it was older technology. How far back do you have to go to get a chip where all the patents have expired? They still make 386s for embedded applications and IIRC they cost less than $2 per. Stick 12 on those on a motherboard for $24... it's the motherboard that would wind up being a pain to design and execute I would guess. And the OS. Still, done right it could be very functional, and not require anything under patent, right?
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20 2017, @06:09AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20 2017, @06:09AM (#456413)

    As long as the tech can be developed by "the community", then that's fine. It's the ability to improve in a particular direction that is valuable; current tech is a totally captured.